Imagine living in a world where even the books you read were policed. This wasn’t fiction for Kim Hyun Sook, who recounts this in the graphic novel Banned Book Club.
Beautifully drawn images accompanied the storyline in a way that really draws the reader in, and certainly provokes the reader to feel for the characters. The story, in a memoir-esque format, feels smooth and isn’t shy when showing the fear of the characters with the military’s censorship during the 1980s. The graphics really brought to life the images necessary to convey a message, as well as truly set the tones and moods that ebbed and flowed within the storyline. I also found the images were rather detailed as well, as if the finer details mattered to the illustrator.
I wasn’t aware that even a single book would have landed you in trouble in South Korea in 1983 until reading this graphic novel. The way it was presented showed how progressive Kim Hyun Sook was in comparison to her parents who just toed the line to avoid getting in trouble.
I appreciate that the main character, Kim, was just starting out college. I feel that it was appropriate to have the story set at that time of the character’s life as that is typically viewed as the time point where people learn the most about who they are, and what they want to be. This is true of Kim, who is young and bright, as well as full of wonder. It was also great how some of the characters tried to challenge the military regime’s ideals within the book club, encouraging (or as I read it, recruiting) freshman year college students to join and read literature that the government has banned, mostly for being way to progressive or ‘dangerous’ to the government’s ideals. Kim knocked back her nervousness of the club (after finding out people got arrested for a similar club), in the fight for a broader knowledge of literature. Knowing that the military disliked this, I felt that they had a very ‘Big Brother’-like feel throughout the book, appearing at rather odd moments to try and spring members of the club.
The themes of politics, militia, literature, and friendship are definitely melded together well in this novel, and made for a compelling and somewhat true story come to life. The story, accompanied with the graphics were definitely something I wasn’t expecting, given I jumped into this book without knowing very much, and honestly, it was such a thrill! I think that this is a book that everyone should read, regardless of whether it happened in the country we live in or not. History is something that is super important to know, and it helps develop our worldviews too.
If you’re a fan of historical fiction, reading about Big Brother-like governments, or standalone graphic novels, Banned Book Club just might be your next favourite graphic novel!
Banned Book Club is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
Will you be picking up Banned Book Club? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
When Kim Hyun Sook started college in 1983 she was ready for her world to open up. After acing her exams and sort-of convincing her traditional mother that it was a good idea for a woman to go to college, she looked forward to soaking up the ideas of Western Literature far from the drudgery she was promised at her family’s restaurant. But literature class would prove to be just the start of a massive turning point, still focused on reading but with life-or-death stakes she never could have imagined.
This was during South Korea’s Fifth Republic, a military regime that entrenched its power through censorship, torture, and the murder of protestors. In this charged political climate, with Molotov cocktails flying and fellow students disappearing for hours and returning with bruises, Hyun Sook sought refuge in the comfort of books. When the handsome young editor of the school newspaper invited her to his reading group, she expected to pop into the cafeteria to talk about Moby Dick, Hamlet, and The Scarlet Letter. Instead she found herself hiding in a basement as the youngest member of an underground banned book club. And as Hyun Sook soon discovered, in a totalitarian regime, the delights of discovering great works of illicit literature are quickly overshadowed by fear and violence as the walls close in.
In BANNED BOOK CLUB, Hyun Sook shares a dramatic true story of political division, fear-mongering, anti-intellectualism, the death of democratic institutions, and the relentless rebellion of reading.
